You’re also going to be wrong a lot of the time.  That’s just how it works.  For all of the powerful SEO tools out there that can help you get a sense of the competition and traffic in your vertical and what it will take to build search traffic, there will always be surprises.  Accept this before you get started: you won’t always come away with success.  What you will come away with, though, is more data to work from.

Every site has a unique:

• Vertical
• Market of users
• History
• Authority
• Technical platform
• Internal link structure
• External link profile

So there’s no “one size fits all” in SEO.  Every solution will look different, have unique components and require it’s own level of time and attention.  That said, the SEO workflow cycle is, in general, the same or quite similar across all situations.

In light of the unpredictable nature of SEO, it makes sense to take measured steps over time and regularly evaluate the impact of actions taken.  In the interest of a simple approach to organization, I use a 4-phase cyclical workflow that informs nearly every campaign I manage.

The Four-Phase SEO Workflow

1. Research – collect and analyze relevant and available data such as
   • Keyword referrals
   • User behavior
   • Keyword data from external sources (average monthly usage, seasonality, emerging trends, competitive data)
   • Competitor data
   • Market data
2. Strategize – prioritize and select opportunities for improvement, set modest hypotheses about the results of tactics, link hypotheses and tactics to specific and reasonable metrics and goals and allocate the resources you’ll need (time, in most cases) to implement these tactics
3. Implement – Get it done!
4. Observe – Monitor the effects of your work, making adjustments or correcting mistakes where necessary (but keep corrections minimal or you’ll convolute the data)

In my experience, the life of this cycle should usually be around 3 months.  Any less (i.e. 1 month) and you’re not allowing enough time for the engines to reevaluate your code/content and adjust rankings (and thereby traffic) accordingly.  Too much more and you could be missing opportunities to react to changes and trends, and you may simply be wasting time.

I should add a slight disclaimer here: if you’re managing a site with a significant amount of traffic, you’re going to need to shorten the cycle quite a bit.  For websites in the upper traffic ranges, changes to site code/structure/content can be reflected in the search results in less than a day.

The idea here is to refine your tactics over time based on the actual results your efforts achieve.  For example, if you create/optimize content to target a given keyword and then observe that the improvement in ranking was minimal at best, your strategy will have to change.  It may mean a reevaluation of the link profile of the website and using new tactics for building authority in that regard (i.e. link building).  It may mean reassessment of your goals altogether – you may have been too optimistic.  This flexibility to make changes to your expectations, strategy and tactics as results come in is crucial to achieving success.

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